For the whole of my career (coming up to ten years now - gulp - how did that happen?) I've always had a Black n' Red hardcover notebook on the go. I started off being a proponent of the case bound A4 ruled but have become a wire bound A5 person of late as I find it more convenient when taking notes in meetings.

The "blame" for my notebook preference can be laid squarely at the door of my first boss. Up until that point I always took my lecture notes on loose-leaf paper and stored them in binders. At first I continued to do this but mislaid some notes that I had taken during a meeting (didn't really matter that time). On hearing this, my boss gave me his spare notebook (Bn'R A4 case bound) and convinced me that a notebook was better as it was impossible to lose individual pages. I did point out to him that you could lose the whole notebook, therefore losing all the notes but he suggested that it would be "best not to do that".

My business card is stuck on the inside of the front cover, with the words "cash reward if returned" underneath. Work stuff goes in the front of the book and personal stuff goes in the back. When they meet in the middle it's time to get another one (worryingly this usually happens at about the 4/5 mark - does this indicate a poor work/life ratio?). I also attach a number of record cards to the back cover using a small fold back clip. These cards are useful for capturing stuff like tasks that might be overlooked in the bulk text of notebook itself. The clip is also useful for attaching any papers, receipts, etc that I need to keep hold of. In the UK these clips are sometimes called bulldog clips but I'm not sure this is the case elsewhere?

I was inspired to see just how many notebooks I've got through and despite my frequent diagrams and mindmaps, I'm half way through only my 14th. Perhaps my handwriting is more compact than I thought.

I was never as brand loyal with pens. Whatever was to hand, as long as it was black, would do (BTW: am I alone in hating writing in blue?), although the classic Bic Crystal was a bit of favourite. This changed recently as my brother gave me a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck Bordeaux Classique Rollerball for my 30th birthday. A very nice pen to write with indeed; very comfortable to hold, smooth and fast drying. This last factor is very important to me as I am left handed and hate smudges.

Regards,
Dom.

Update:

My other note taking mechanism is a trivial script that I can run on my PC to create a new text file in my notes directory and open it my text editor. The code is shown here in some embarrassment as it was one of the first things I ever wrote in Perl and it shows (note the missing "use warnings") but I use it multiple times a day and it does what I need.

#perl -w
use strict;

my ($mday, $month, $year, $szBaseFilename, $szFilename, $szSubject) = 
+"";
my $iLoopCount = 0;
my $szPath = 'E:\users\dbush\Notes';

(undef, undef, undef, $mday, $month, $year, undef, undef, undef) = loc
+altime(time);

$month = $month + 1;
$year  = $year  + 1900;

if ($mday  < 10) {$mday  = "0$mday"}
if ($month < 10) {$month = "0$month"}

system "title Create today's note";

$szSubject = GetUserInput("Subject");

$szBaseFilename = "$szPath\\$year-$month-$mday";

if ($szSubject eq "") {
    $szFilename = "$szBaseFilename.txt";
} else {
    $szFilename = "$szBaseFilename $szSubject.txt";
}        

while (-e $szFilename) {
    $iLoopCount++;
    
    if ($szSubject eq "") {
        $szFilename = "$szBaseFilename--$iLoopCount.txt";
    } else {
        $szFilename = "$szBaseFilename--$iLoopCount $szSubject.txt";
    }        
    
    print "Trying $szFilename...\n";    
}

open hFile, ">$szFilename" or die "Can't open file $szFilename for wri
+te: $!\n";
print hFile "$mday/$month/$year\n$szSubject\n\n";
close hFile;

system "notepad $szFilename";

exit;

### Supporting functions ###

sub GetUserInput {
    my ($szPrompt, $szDefaultVal, $szValidRegEx) = @_;
    my $szInput = "";

    do {
    
        if ($szDefaultVal eq undef) {
            print $szPrompt.": ";
            chomp($szInput = <STDIN>);
        } else {
            print "$szPrompt [$szDefaultVal]: ";
            chomp($szInput = <STDIN>);
            if ($szInput eq "") {$szInput = $szDefaultVal;}
        }

    } until $szInput =~ /$szValidRegEx/ or $szValidRegEx eq undef;
    
    return $szInput;
}
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